Beeb stuffs $21tn into Olympic-sized swimming pools

The BBC has agreebly calculated that the amount of wonga Brits have squirrelled away in offshore accounts would fill no less than 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The total in question is $21tn, or £13.5tn. Were this substantial wedge "denominated in $1 bills", it would occupy rather a lot of Olympic Park Aquatics Centres.

Warming to the concept of "overwrought quantification metaphors", the Beeb continues:

Put another way, 21 trillion seconds ago, the world was 600,000 years younger and experiencing the Lower Palaeolithic period. This was the time of Homo Heidelbergensis, one of mankind's early ancestors.

Archaeologists say Heidelbergensis was in some ways quite advanced, with rudimentary language and, maybe, a habit of burying the dead.

But they were also extremely primitive. There is a lot of evidence to suggest he had not yet discovered the ability to measure large quantities of anything in terms of how many Olympic-sized swimming pools would be filled - a skill we would regard as essential now.

Quite so. Long-term readers will know that Auntie was already using the Olympic-sized swimming pool back in 2010, following its official adoption by El Reg.

Our own Lucy Sherriff recently filled a few pools with pumice, as you can see in our official Reg Standards vid: